The Warrior King (Book 4) (28 page)

The unstoppable ravager force had been almost completely eliminated. Only three of the undead knights remained, but these three pressed Whelan back along the battlements. Whelan had full command of Soultrup now, but he hadn’t yet struck a killing blow that would bind Pradmort’s soul to the blade. And now they had forced him onto the roof of one of the guard towers, where all three could assault him at once with an overpowering onslaught of slashing, thrusting swords. The first of the Knights Temperate was only a few feet away, already atop the battlements. The king only needed to hold off the enemy a few more seconds and he would have help.

Markal ran toward Whelan. As he did, he hid his withered hands in his sleeves and shouted.

“The Harvester take you all!” He drew short and began to chant loudly in the old tongue.

He had no more magic left, but his bluff had the desired effect. The two ravagers at the rear turned, snarling, and made as if to come at him.

Whelan took advantage of the two enemies withdrawing their attack to leap at his remaining foe. He brought Soultrup around from his shoulder. Pradmort lifted his weapon to block the strike, but this time Soultrup seemed to bend
around
his defense. The sword came in between the breastplate and the gorget that protected Pradmort’s throat. It severed the man’s neck and he fell. There was no blood.

Markal wasn’t such a fool as to keep up his bluff in the face of the two remaining ravagers. He fled before they could attack him, and Whelan’s bellowed challenge made them turn again. They attacked Whelan with all the fury of a blacksmith attacking a piece of glowing metal. But this time, they found the heights of the guard tower filling with Knights Temperate, each man fresh and shouting with righteous fury. The two sides traded blows, and then one of the knights hacked one of the remaining ravagers to his knees, where Whelan finished him off with Soultrup. The remaining ravager kept attacking and wounded one man on the shoulder, forcing him to withdraw. But another knight joined the battle. And still the ravager fought on tirelessly.

The ravager’s sword broke, and he grabbed for Pradmort’s weapon, which lay at his feet. As he came up, Whelan jumped at him with a final, killing blow across the temple. A cheer went up from the walls and bailey.

The undead knights were vanquished, and the king had triumphed, but in the plains and fields of the eastern khalifates, the battle with Pasha Ismail raged on into the night.

But Whelan didn’t yet turn his attention to its conclusion. Instead, he found his brother’s dead body and knelt to cradle the man’s head. And he wept.

#

With darkness, it grew difficult for the king to move his pieces on the battlefield. Whelan sent riders and had his trumpeter sound the movement of various armies, but the flags of the signal corps were useless, and the king and his advisers had been blinded. Word came that Pasha Ismail had escaped with several thousand men after his cavalry broke a hole in the left flank of the Balsalomians that had been pinning him between the hills. The survivors fled east toward Veyre.

But as calm descended, Markal and Whelan inspected the battlefield to discover a complete victory. The ravagers had been destroyed seemingly to a man, the caravan of supplies was unscathed. Hundreds of Veyrians and Chalfeans had been taken prisoner, and perhaps four thousand more had fallen on the battlefield, together with six giants and eleven mammoths. Against that number, Whelan had lost perhaps a thousand dead and another thousand wounded. The most grievous injury was the damage done to Hoffan’s reserve cavalry that had borne the brunt of the ravager attack, but the losses were few compared to what the enemy had suffered. And the enemy was already outnumbered by the powerful combined armies. It would struggle to recover from this blow.

“It’s time,” Whelan told Markal and Hoffan when the three of them returned to the castle, where men were hard at work by torchlight clearing the broken stones and other debris so people could get in and out of the castle without climbing over all the rubble. A bonfire in front of the walls was burning the bodies of those dead ravagers who had been recovered from the ruins.

“If we’re lucky,” the king continued, “we’ll overtake Ismail before he reaches Veyre, but either way, Toth is in no position to halt our attack. In a week, we’ll have the city surrounded.”

“You’re sure it’s not a trap?” Hoffan said.

The big mountain lord sounded uncharacteristically cautious, but Markal thought that might be the aftermath of the battle itself. His shoulder was bandaged from a sword gash, and he had taken a fall from his horse and apparently been knocked temporarily senseless.

“The dark wizard smashed an army trying to get to our supplies and wrecked his ravagers trying to kill me and seize the sword.”

That was true, but there was no evidence that Toth didn’t have more ravagers at his disposal, plus the ability to raise more undead champions. That would take time, Markal hoped. Months, perhaps.

“If that is your wish, my lord,” Hoffan said, “then I propose we move out tonight. There is no reason for delay. We’ll continue east, securing the road as we go. Lord Nyle’s men are fresh, and the pasha from Ter—Jasboah—didn’t reach the battlefield until the fighting was done. They have two thousand men apiece. They can march to the Pletus River and take the fords.”

“Excellent plan,” Whelan said with a nod. “Make it happen.”

Hoffan snapped his fingers to call a messenger so he could send a dispatch. While Hoffan gave instructions, Markal and Whelan looked down at a pair of riders that came riding up toward the castle by torchlight, part of a neverending stream of messengers and returning scouts that would no doubt keep the king awake all night.

Whelan put a hand on Markal’s shoulder. “That will be Lord Denys. Can you advise him until I return?”

“Where are you going?” Markal asked, surprised.

The light from the comet reflected off Whelan’s grim expression, making him look like one of the statues of dead kings in the great hall in the Citadel in Arvada. “I’m going back to the stone circle. I want to talk to my brother.”

“Now?”

“He might have information—about the ravagers, enemy troop movements, the dark wizard himself.” Whelan dropped his eyes to his hands, then lifted them up again to meet Markal’s gaze. “But apart from that, I need to thank Roderick and tell him I’m sorry for all he suffered.”

Chapter Twenty-six

All night long, the monster roared and bellowed in the desert outside Darik and Sofiana’s hiding place. Their camel struggled and fought against its rope until it had rubbed its flesh raw around the nose and it collapsed in heaving, shuddering exhaustion. Darik thought about cutting it loose, but whenever he ventured close, the terrified beast snapped and spit at him.

Meanwhile, the two humans huddled most of the night in fear as the fire died to embers and then ash. The sound of cracking stone and what sounded like crunching bone reached their ears at one point, followed by a horrible, metallic stench like the vapors of the earth coming out to suffocate them. At last, the sound died down, but they didn’t dare venture out.

When the gray of early dawn stained the desert horizon, they rose stiff and exhausted. The camel was spent from its struggles, and they wouldn’t be riding it anywhere, but maybe it would recover its strength if they led it out and away from this awful place.

Sofiana’s courage seemed to have failed, so Darik emerged first from their campsite against the rocks. Something had torn up the ground on the hillside below: smooth-barked gum tree and thorny bushes ripped up by the roots, boulders smashed to pieces, and gouges dug into the ground. As they followed the path of destruction, they came upon the body of a lion. Or rather, the blood-soaked half-body of a lion; it seemed to have been bitten in two. The lower half had been eaten or carried elsewhere. Vultures filled the sky overhead, soaring on spread wings, but none of them came down to pluck at the carcass.

“What could do that?” Sofiana asked, her voice a frightened whisper. She looked more than ever like a child and not the confident, almost arrogant daughter of a warrior king that she had been playing at since he met her.

Darik had an idea but didn’t want to speculate aloud until he was sure. They continued cautiously up the hillside to where they could get a better view of their surroundings, and midway up they came upon a dark and steaming hole that burrowed straight into the ground. The soil around it was freshly disturbed and charred, as if something had been slumbering in the ground and had come clawing its way out. The air carried the distinct odor of charcoal, like a blacksmith’s fire, but beyond that he also smelled something cloying and sweet, like a woman’s perfume. That was curious.

They crested the hill, and Darik caught sight of the red spire a few hundred feet away. It was a column of stone—more orange, really, than red—that rose from the desert floor to form a pinnacle some hundred feet off the ground. A spring flowed into a brackish pond and formed a small but lush oasis, ringed by palm trees.

And here they found their Kratian friends, or what remained of them: severed limbs, scattered innards buzzing with flies, and bloody robes. Dead and half-eaten camels lay everywhere, together with scattered gear and trade goods. The shifting breeze brought the heavy scent of frankincense. That was the perfumed smell he’d detected earlier; the valuable cargo of the Kratians scattered with their dead bodies. So much death, yet the vultures never came down from the sky to feast.

That was because in the middle of all the carnage lay an immense, sleeping dragon. Black, shimmering scales covered its immense length from the wicked curved horn on its nose to the tip of its tail, which had to be a hundred feet away. Its belly was distended from having devoured the Kratians and much of their camel herd. As it shifted in its sleep, he caught a glint of something shiny and metallic where its wing met its shoulder. It was the hilt of a sword buried into its flesh. Darik caught his breath.

This was the dragon Daria had battled in the skies over the mountains. She had thrown herself onto its back and plunged her sword into its flesh where the black, scaly armor was weakest. He’d heard the story from Daria’s own mouth, had been stunned by her bravery at the time, but now that he was staring at the monster itself, the story was doubly heroic.

The dragon must have come down to the desert to heal from its wounds. There it had dug a lair in the dry hillside and buried itself. Perhaps it had been emerging already, or maybe the Kratian caravan had roused it, but either way it had clawed itself free, frightened away the lions, and then mauled Abudallah and his companions. After a long night of gorging itself on its victims, Darik hoped it would be too lethargic to give chase, but he didn’t intend to wake it and find out.

He turned to see Sofiana staring with her eyes wide and her mouth ajar. He gestured with his head, and the two of them returned swiftly and quietly to their hideout. They untied the exhausted camel and led it in the opposite direction from the oasis and the dragon.

It was an hour before either of them dared speak. After Darik asked Sofiana if she was all right, the girl nodded and cleared her throat.

“Was that the dragon your bird girl fought?”

“Yes. The same one.”

“In that case, I’m sorry for the bad things I said about her. I can see why you would love her. She must be fearless and powerful.”

“Thank you for that,” Darik said, thinking that perhaps Sofiana was maturing after all. “Daria is both of those things.”

“The thing I don’t understand is what she could possibly find interesting about you.”

#

Chantmer and Roghan sat on pillows in the middle of the throne room, with Daniel and Marialla opposite them. Nobody sat on the sultan’s throne. There were no other people in the room, not even guards. Chantmer had a few in the palace, but hadn’t yet consolidated his power and needed to keep the ones he trusted at the gates. If the dead sultan’s sons wanted to send someone to murder him, Chantmer thought, now would be the perfect moment. The usurpers of Marrabat were all in this room.

And the wizard hoped they would make an attempt. Let assassins come by the dozens; Chantmer would crush them all and eliminate future threats. Burning a few enemies alive would show that he had regained his power.

“Be clear in your offer, wizard,” Daniel said, his tone hard. “Is it to rule this city, or is it to be a puppet on the throne?”

Like Chantmer, the former high king of Eriscoba had regained much of his strength. Gone was the sickly, dying king tormented by the wight of his dead wife, Serena. He now looked and acted like his brothers: Whelan, Ethan, Roderick. Tall and strong, with a piercing gaze and a commanding voice. A king people would follow. Yet in Marrabat, he would be a
barbarian
king, which none of these people in the south would care for. That was why Chantmer also needed Princess Marialla. 

“You will not be ruler of Marrabat in name,” Chantmer said. “That will be Princess Marialla—excuse me,
Sultana
Marialla. But as her consort, you will take command of the armies of the city and its lands. Mufashe commanded thirty thousand men. A massive force lurked down here prepared to invade the khalifates, perhaps to join the dark wizard. Who knows what the sultan intended? But now they will be held in your hand, to send to Veyre in support of your brother. With thirty thousand more men, King Whelan will surely win the war.”